PART ONE: NO-ONE SAW IT COMING
How did we get from the swinging clean guitar of 1940 Charlie Christian to the in-your-face aggression of Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album? If you just said, “A freakin’ huge amplifier and some powerchords,” then you’re not wrong. But there’s a little more to it than that. The sound of the guitar evolved slowly through invention, transforming itself into something that literally defied imagination.
Over the past few months, I’ve shared the endlessly fascinating stories of how our favourite effects came to be after the guitar was first electrified in 1932. The sounds of tremolo, echo, distortion and reverberation gave the guitar a new voice, expanded its vocabulary and helped it to shape the beginnings of dozens of musical genres that we take for granted today. These new guitar sounds were as much evolution as they were invention, as guitar tinkerers and DIY masters used the world around them to expand what a
